Memory of Christmas movies being about
to fade away for another year, it is high time to explore the
metaphysics of counterfactuals – as Frank Capra no doubt did when
screening for his own family every Christmas George Bailey's odyssey
in Bedford Falls and Pottersville.
In order to save Jimmy's Stewart's George from a Christmas Eve suicide, guardian angel Clarence Odbody tours him through a counterfactual world in which George was never born. Pottersville, nee Bedford Falls, is a nightmare wrought by the greed of that poster child of capitalist villainy, Henry Potter. It's all rental slums, pawn shops, cheap bars, cheap dance clubs, and cheap women – more of the latter three than you would think a town of that size could possibly support. The modest but well kept middle class development underwritten by the Bailey Savings and Loan is gone. In its place is a graveyard, with a notable tombstone for George's younger brother, Harry, who became a war hero in the George-world, but a drowning victim here because George was not on the scene to save him.
So your first question is doubtless:
What is the ontological status of Pottersville? The least exotic
possibility is that it is not real at all, but only a grand delusion
created entirely in George's mind as he stood there on the bridge.
Slightly
more robust would be a Pottersville with a physical reality limited
to what George sees, hears, touches, or otherwise senses.
There is no inside to the buildings that George doesn't enter, and,
more disturbingly, no fronts to the people George sees only from the
back.
If you prefer more rounded objects,
Pottersville might still be a simulation after the fashion of a
really good Star Trek holodeck. As a holodeck simulation becomes
more and more like physical reality, there will be some point at
which we may have to face the question whether it hasn't become
physical reality – if physical reality with an unusual backstory. (For near-reality simulations see "Russian Doll: Time, Many Worlds, and Computer Simulations." https://lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com/2020/04/russian-doll-time-many-worlds-and.html.)
Perfect holodecks and perfect elaborate
delusions are, of course, not hard for a being or beings with
omnipotence and omniscience. As interpretations of the movie,
however, these modest ontologies are made somewhat implausible by
Clarence's copy of Tom Sawyer,
apparently a perfectly ordinary physical object, which appears in
the final (George-world) scene.
Even a Pottersville
with ordinary physical objects might have been created, ex nihilo,
with a start date of 12/24/45 – a special purpose creation solely
to deal with the George problem. The Pottersville population have
existed for mere hours, although, of course, having the well
counterfeited memories of normal lives in the counterfacual
Georgeless world history. This possibility may seem a tad unfair to
the Mary, Bert, Ernie, and Violet of this world, but they will vanish
quite painlessly, and, at least for Mary and Violet, it is not at all
clear that they would lose much.
Another possibility
is that the George-world and the world without George have exactly
the same ontological status. This could be a diverging worlds
picture. At or before the time of George's birth the two world's
start to go their separate ways. Clarence merely takes a cross-world
transit with George, and then sends him back to his home world.
Many such worlds
may diverge from their common base world every second, or there might
be only few – as some need for them arises as here. (How could the
Powers That Be know that a parallel Georgeless world would be needed
to save George? That is, how could they know it back before George
was born? Well, omniscient foreknowledge would do the trick. However
the Powers represented by talking galaxies seem a little less
prescient than that. Perhaps there are “seed” possible worlds at
all moments of time, which can, as needed, be germinated and run fast
forward in supertime to catch up with the present. There are lots of
films, especially those with time travelers, that implicitly or
explicitly rely on parallel universes, and sometimes on a supertime
in which universes can run at different clock speeds. (See my post of
6/19/2014, Groundhog Day: The Movie as Metaphysics.)
There are,soberly considered,
some moral and theological problems with Bedford Falls and
Pottersville having the same ontological status. If angelic
intervention was appropriate to persuade George out of suicide by
seeing how awful Pottersville would be, it is disquieting if
Pottersville exists after all, with its squalid slums, with Violet
reduced to prostitution, and with Mr. Gower, the kindly druggist of
Bedford falls, an alcoholic beggar. (Some theological questions could
also be asked about intercessory prayer. The angels seemed to rely
upon a prayer tally in deciding whether or not to intervene in human
affairs.)
The most serious
issue of the film, however, is neither theological nor a matter of
the ontological status of the Pottersville world. It is counterfacual
individuation and counterfactual selection. Here is the problem. “The
world in which George Bailey wasn't born” surely does not pick out
a unique counterfactual world. There were lots of ways George might
have failed to be born. His father might have been hit by a horseless
carriage; his mother might have had a headache. You may think that
Clarence's superiors could sensibly ignore these worlds because they
were not the “closest” counterfactual to the actual world in
which George was born.
If we, however,
concede that the angels were within their rights in selecting against
very distant (very different at divergence) counterfactual worlds,
the point can quickly be turned against them.(Devil's advocacy?) In
worlds intimately close to the world of George's conception, any
number of different sperm very nearly fertilized the egg. Surely one
of worlds in which a non-George sperm won the race would be the very
closest of counterfactual worlds. (Apparently in the Pottersville
world, no child at all was born to the Baileys before Harry. It
strains credulity to think this the closest possible world.)
In most of the very
close to actual worlds we would have, then, not George, but someone
very like George. After all, half of his genetic makeup would be
strictly identical to George's. And the other half would probably not
be so very different, given paternal identity. This Near-George must
have had personality rather like George's. There would be very
similar nature and identical nurture. Mightn't Near-George have done
many of the same things that George did? Indeed, might Near-George
have had less worldly ambition and wanderlust than had George, making
his dedication to the Savings and Loan all the stronger, resulting in
a yet better Bedford Falls?
I can draw no other
conclusion than that Clarence cheated. Well, it probably wasn't
Clarence. He was honest to a fault, and, besides, it would have been
beyond his pay grade. Moreover, we see Clarence consulting openly with someone in the bridge-keepers shed, although we do not hear the plan as conveyed from above and agreed to by Clarence. Presumably it was his superior Joseph (is this the Joseph, or
just a Joseph?) who selected the counterfactual world. In any event, the plan adopted exposed George to a particularly unappealing
counterfactual world. It was selected with full knowledge that some counterfactuals
closer to actual reality would have looked much less dire. So in the
end “It's a Wonderful Life” raises this question: If you can't
trust angels, whom can you trust?
For other metaphysical movies, see (right click and open):
For other metaphysical movies, see (right click and open):
If your tastes run to movies and murder (and criminal law theory), please see
For criminal law theory in a real case (Zarate) Proving Abandoned and Malignant Heart Murder: The Zarate Case
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